


autobiography

by arabellagaleotti



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: BAMF Tony Stark, Gen, Hurt Tony Stark, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark Friendship, James "Rhodey" Rhodes is a Good Bro, Near Death Experiences, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark-centric, fuck well thats all youre getting, it's not too bad at all but if that makes you uncomfortable then don't read, its good I promise, kinda abt tony reflecting on his life and stuff, oh also there's a little bit of mention of obie/tony having a non-con relationship, uuhhhhh how do i tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25637878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arabellagaleotti/pseuds/arabellagaleotti
Summary: just a weird little one-shot i thought up, about tony reflecting on his life - with a twist on afganistan/tony's time in the cave.
Relationships: Happy Hogan & Tony Stark, Howard Stark & Maria Stark & Tony Stark, James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, Obadiah Stane/Tony Stark, Pepper Potts & Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Ho Yinsen, implied
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	autobiography

  
  


Tony is eighteen years old, and he is brilliant, young, full of fire. Everyone who doesn't hate him wants to be him.

Except him. He'd been anyone else, with his soul rattling around inside of him, and those parents, and that paparazzi following him. He's famous, apparently. The party boy. The genius. The club kid. Only he isn't. Or, he doesn't want to be. He just wants to build. He genuinely enjoys making things. Well, that wholesome fact and He just wants to have fun, and live a little — just enough to have his heartbeat in his chest. Two things. Is that much to ask? Apparently. 

He's just left MIT, graduated summa cum laude with master degrees in engineering and physics. Is he enough now?

No one bothered to try and poach him, he belongs to Stark Industries, but sometimes he wishes he someone did try. Maybe that would be easier. Now, he has to live up to his father's name, he has to live up to his legacy.

Obie tries to placate him, those nights when he’s bruising and raw and thinks he’s going to vibrate to a frequency so high he'll explode. Those nights, when he’s angry, Obie places his big hands, with those palms like the width of tires on the back of his neck, the small of his back, anywhere he can reach. 

It always makes him feel tiny, those hands. 

He has to fight the board every step, they don’t like his fresh thinking, his new way of doing things. 

Old men like the old ways, he learns soon enough. 

He turns to music for solace, to help with those nights when Obie isn’t there. He sits alone in his big house, the surround sound vibrating him to early hearing loss, but Tony will deal with that later. He sits on the bed, jeans and shoes on, on top of the covers, spine melting and solidifying like wax. There are more options when he can't deal with being alone. 

The party doesn't make him feel small, it makes him feel unimportant; just another one of the bodies. He likes the beat drops, the drinks, the people. The girls, mostly. Mostly. 

What he likes more, though, are evenings spent with Rhodey, on the couch, fingers greasy with butter, shovelling popcorn into their mouths and laughing over cheesy movies. He’d be wearing a hoodie, one of Rhodey's, and since it’s too big for him, flops over his hands. He doesn't wear it out, no, it's too...vulnerable for that. He only wears suits and $300 grey t-shirts outside, sometimes nudity.

His parents die Christmas ‘91. He goes to the funeral even though he doesn't want to. He upheaves everything in his stomach a half-hour before the event. Obie places one of his big hands on his neck on the ride over, and Tony's stomach turns again. 

The funeral is a gaudy, terrible press parade. There’s paparazzi at every turn, and his parent’s open caskets are possibly the most traumatizing thing he’s ever seen. 

His father’s face is still lined, but he’s got half a litre of botox in to stop him looking gaunt and old like he did before death; it’s been good to him, Tony thinks, as he pretends to look sad. To look like the grieving son. 

His mother, well she’s about three shades lighter than she was in real life and a Spanish rosary with wooden beads is missing from her hands. 

He leans back up and turns into the blinding light of paparazzi flashes. He's glad for the sunglasses. 

He grows up a little, stops the parties, spends all his time that he’s not in his workshop at press events; gala’s, benefits, balls, whatever his PR agent says he should go to. _Clean up your image,_ she says, _fine, alright,_ he says back, for the first time. He doesn't mind, the parties are getting boring anyway. He's getting old. His back hurts. 

The public hates him and loves him with both hands, given and taken equally. 

One hand, he is the biggest weapons manufacturer in the world, the benefits of war, of death. One the other, he’s charming, funny, he makes jokes with interviewers, he can make anyone feel part of his world, full of fast cars and expensive liquor, even when they're not and never will be, because that world is something you don’t achieve, it’s something you’re born into.

Then, he's making jokes with a kid — oh god the kid, the kid — one second, and dying the next. It’s a whirlwind, he’s getting out of the car, screaming at Rhodey, he’s running, he’s hiding, he’s trying to send a message, then he’s on his back, there’s blood in his mouth, his vest has failed. 

Yinsen is the first person since his mother and Jarvis that he doesn't bother pretending around. He's not Tony Stark, flamboyant, crazy, eccentric, crude billionaire. He's Tony stark, prisoner. He's nothing. He's hurt, and his walls are all rubble. 

Yinsen tells him about his family but Tony doesn't tell him about him. About Maria Carbonell, about Rhodey, Pepper, Happy, the bots, JARVIS and Jarvis. He wants to, and he nearly does — the words climb up his throat and wait next to his teeth, but he can’t spit them out. 

He knows what Yinsen thinks of him. He's a dickhead, he’s a genius-playboy-billionaire-philanthropist, the living embodiment of capitalism and modern-age America and everything wrong in the world, and he is. He is. He's not anything more, and it’s been years since he has been. When he was a kid, there was a chance there. Promise. He could've been someone so different if given that chance. He wasn't. Maybe he just didn’t take it. 

He wakes up early one morning. Maybe in the morning. He doesn't have any sense of time here. Anyway. No one's asking anything of him yet, and Yinsen’s still asleep so he puts a hand over his chest and just _wishes._ Wishes that he’s not this fucked up next go around if reincarnation turns out to be a thing. Wishes that he’d said something to Yinsen, because maybe then he could escape when Tony’s dead and go tell them all that he cared, he did. 

_Your friend Tony, he cared about you. He loved you. All he wanted to do was escape for you._ Rhodey would hide his tears in his lash line and hug Yinsen like he's Tony, and Pepper would start to cry but try to hold it back, and then Happy would crack some little self-defensive joke and then when he’s alone, he’d break down. That's how it would happen, Tony knows. But it won’t happen, and not because he won’t escape, and not because he won’t die, those are very real possibilities, but because he didn’t tell Yinsen how he feels. 

Instead they’ll get the news, wherever they are, that the search is stopping and Tony Stark is presumed dead or maybe real dead depending on how good the military is, and Rhodey would fight it, he’d crawl his way into every board room and email inbox he can and try to get them to keep looking, but he wouldn't succeed. Pepper would swallow it, she can always get a new job, and she will, but she’d go home that night and kick off her shoes in her empty house and pour a glass of wine without drinking it and then she’d cry, and tears-dripping cry, not dainty, not sweet, it’d be a chest-hurting cry. Happy… he doesn't know. Maybe he’d hear it on the radio while driving, and he’d pull off the road and recline his seat down and just sit there for a while. JARVIS would have to tell the bots, and that would hurt them and hurt him. But then they would all get better. 

Pepper can get a new job easily, and even better one without a dead, demanding boss and crazy hours, and Rhodey's got a career in the military with or without him. Happy can keep driving for what's left of SI until it all crumbles, and then he can ditch the ship and start working for Hammer Industries, or something. JARVIS… maybe JARVIS can just go on vacation, arrange for the bots to go to another lab where they’ll treat them good and then go dormant until he wants to wake up again, or maybe he can work for Fury or something. Just so his boy is doing something, because JARVIS’s worst hell is him not being able to do anything. 

Anyway. Enough depressing thoughts, he thinks Yinsen is waking up. 

— 

Yinsen dies and the analytical part of Tony — the part that doesn't care past the statistics and financial gain supposes it’s a good thing. He can't talk anymore, spill any secrets of what he saw or heard in that cave. 

Tony wonders how he got here, as he’s staggering through the desert, one step at a time, panting, burning, oases flickering in front of him every time he looks to the corner of his eyes. He knows it’s not real. He knows it’s not real, but he can’t convince himself of it. 

Then two giant black military helicopters rise above the dunes behind him like fat, buzzing flies and he thinks about mirages, and then he feels the sand sting his eyes, and he knows. He cries out, and laughs and waves his hands above his head. He collapses, he knows. His knees give out, and his hands are lifting above his head in victory, and he’s peace-signing like one of those hippies his dad always talked about but oh — fuck _they found him._

He gets back, and that's just as quick of a whirlwind, the helicopter ride, Rhodey's grin and the medic onboard trying to poke him with things he insists not. They can't know about his chest. They can’t know because Tony's been thinking a lot, and he hasn't quite sorted it all out yet, but he knows he doesn't want to give the military this. They land, and Pepper’s there, trying not to cry, like he said, they're fighting in the car again, Tony's ordering press conference and Pepper's insisting on the hospital and Tony's overruling her valid suggestion that's for his own good to do some other stupid shit. He's back, baby! 

After that, there's the press conference, which...he doesn't have to explain that, does he? Christ, they're going to fucking kill him, all of them, Obie, the shareholders, the stockholders, Pepper, his father's ghost. After after that, he's _home_ , finally. 

He walks through his house, his big house, his beautiful house. JARVIS is still talking to him, but he stopped listening a while ago. He ends up in his bedroom, untouched for three months. It’s a bit dusty, all of the house is, and the only addition to how he left it is the bed being made and a few papers he probably meant to sign on the bedside table; left there by Pepper, before everything went to shit. 

He’s got lots of messages. He’s probably got so many. Oh, god, he’s gonna have to conference with Tokyo tomorrow no doubt. When did life turn into this? Messages and papers on the bed and no one that actually cares about him. He's made it that way, pushed everyone away that ever had a chance.

He sinks to his knees in front of the bed, of his horrifically high thread count sheets, of the papers that are three months old and a made bed that should still have Christine Everhart's underwear in it. He doesn't know what to do, he doesn't know what to do now — well, he does, but he doesn’t know how and when and honestly he just wants someone to hold him and tell him what to do and that it’ll all be alright, but no one knows that. 

He sobs, suddenly, it tears through his throat like tissue paper. He bends, braces his arms on the bed and sobs and _sobs_ . his position is odd, like he’s praying, but he doesn't think he's ever truly prayed, only sent up quick texts like _fuck, don't let Obie catch me in this skirt it's just a dare_ and _Oh dear god, please don't ring my parents_ and such. His chest hurts but his chest always hurts. Just a side effect of having a hole dug in it. 

God has never turned his back on him more, but that’s what he gets, he guesses, for being such an absolute dickhead all his life. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! give a little love/CONSTRUCTIVE criticism in the comments! 
> 
> :)


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